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Today we worked on reviewing average, median and mode before talking about how to use those tools to make arguments around a set of data. Students were given basketball statistics and data about restaurants in NYC and a set of statements that weren’t correct about the data and asked them to reword the statement so it actually reflected the data. After that I wanted to get into the “Hot Dog Festival” worksheet when my teenagers started acting like teenagers and nothing got done.

Do you ever find worksheets on your computer from last year and think “This worksheet was the Jam! I’m going to roll this out tomorrow and it will be awesome!” I had a worksheet like that today, and I was really excited about how awesome it was going to be. As class started, I realized before I even started teaching it, that it wasn’t going to go well. The beginning of this worksheet had some jokes in it that I forgot about. Naturally, bedlam broke loose when I asked the goofiest kid in the class to read the prompt out loud knowing that there is only w0 minutes to go in the 90-minute block, and that everyone was a little punchy. My one small joke about sausages set off the class and these two boys couldn’t stop laughing about it. I overlooked the joke when I chose this worksheet because I was too focused on how the task fit mathematically in the unit. The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t rest on your laurels just because something worked last year.

Hopefully we can finish the hotdog activity on Thursday, and then we can get into the outlier activity. This activity is another one that I did last year. Naturally, I will spend much more time preparing for Thursday’s class than I did today. (I might even write a blog post about it.

Are you wondering what the joke was? Ask me in the comments!

3/3

Edit, ok here is a link to the worksheet, you can see what threw them off in there: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1afWGNu0PtdxchiSRnP4jHBD7lHcNFVBQnRkDW0aol1Y/edit?usp=sharing

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Thanks everyone for coming! Here are the slides and a link to the google doc. Below is the google doc full of your ideas that we only temporarily destoryed: #NCTM Regionals Social Justice Ideas for Math Class